Month: April 2017

On Linda Cliatt-Wayman‘s first day as principal at a failing high school in North Philadelphia, she was determined to lay down the law. But she soon realized the job was more complex than she thought. With palpable passion, she shares the three principles that helped her turn around three schools labeled “low-performing and persistently dangerous.” Her fearless determination to lead — and to love the students, no matter what — is a model for leaders in all fields.

Why you should listen

Linda Cliatt-Wayman grew up in poverty in North Philadelphia, where she experienced firsthand the injustice being perpetrated against poor students in their education. She has dedicated her career and her life to ending that injustice, working within Philadelphia’s fractured public-school system. She spent 20 years as a special-ed teacher before becoming a principal, leading two low-performing urban high schools to success with improved test scores and increased college admissions among students.

Now at Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion High School, Wayman and her team are once again proving what is possible for low-income children. Test scores have improved every year since Wayman took over, and the school was removed from the federal Persistently Dangerous Schools List for the first time in five years. Diane Sawyer and her team spent the 2012-2013 school year documenting Wayman’s efforts for ABC World News Tonight and Nightline.

Parents
Your mother and father are your parents who care for you while you are growing.Father: a person’s male parent. We usually call our father Dad or Daddy.Mother: a person’s female parent. We usually call our mother Mum or Mummy.

GrandparentsGrandfather: a father of a person’s parent. We usually call our grandfather grandad (US granddad) or grandpa.Grandmother: a mother of a person’s parent. We usually call our grandmother gran, grandma or granny.

Siblings
Your brothers and sisters are your siblings with same parents.Brother: a male person with the same parents as another personSister: a female person with the same parents as another person

Our uncle and aunt are the siblings of our parents.Uncle: a brother of a person’s parent; a husband of a person’s auntAunt: a sister of a person’s parent; a wife of a person’s uncle

Children
Your son and daughter are your children.

Son: a male childDaughter: a female childCousin (also first cousin): a child of a person’s aunt or uncleNephew: a son of a person’s siblingNiece: a daughter of a person’s sibling

Grandchildren
The child of your son or daughter is your grandchild.Grandson: a son of a person’s childGranddaughter: a daughter of a person’s child

Spouse
The partner in marriage is our spouse. Our wife or husband is our spouse.Husband: a male partnerWife: a female partner

Parents of the spouseFather-in-law: a father of a person’s spouseMother-in-law: a mother of a person’s spouseBrother-in-law: a brother of a person’s spouseSister-in-law: a sister of a person’s spouse

Exes
Your ex-wife or ex-husband is your former partner in marriage.

Half-siblingsHalf-brother: a male person who has either the same mother or the same father (but not both) as another personHalf-sister: a female person who has either the same mother or the same father (but not both) as another person

StepparentsStepmother: new wife of a person’s father in a second marriageStepfather: a new husband of a person’s mother in a second marriage

Stepchild
Your stepbrother or stepsister is the child of your stepparent but not your biological parent.

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no ham in hamburger, no egg in eggplant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. French fries weren’t invented in France, and English muffins weren’t invented in England. Furthermore, quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is not from Guinea nor is it a pig!

English is also a silly language at times, too. I mean, who in their right mind would create two words with the same spelling and different meanings? I am of course talking about those pesky homographs. For example:

“He wound up the clock with ease, even though he had a wound to his right hand.”

How ridiculous! Of course, you could, and probably would, rephrase that sentence to avoid the homographs. But there are times when we find ourselves accidentally sucked into the vacuum, and like a dog’s mess gracing the pavement of a dark lane, we occasionally step on a homograph-ridden sentence.

Now, before we dive into our list of homographs for your grammatical pleasure, bear in mind that a homograph that is also pronounced differently is called a ‘heteronym’. Oh, and while we’re here, don’t forget the ‘homophone’, which is when two or more words share the same pronunciation but have different meanings, and may or may not be spelled the same way.

And one last thing…

The homograph, heteronym and homophone are all types of ‘homonym’; which is defined as two or more words that share the same spelling, or the same pronunciation, or both, but have different meanings.

1. Rita was too close to the door to close it.
2. Dan’s wife said he should polish the Polish furniture on a regular basis.
3. I did not object to the object in question.
4. There is no time like the present to present a friend with a present.
5. The vegetable farm was asked to produce organic produce for the local community.
6. Unfortunately the insurance was invalid for the invalid.
7. The dog lead was dangerous because it was made of lead.
8. I had to hide the animal hide before my vegetarian friend came to dinner.
9. A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer pipeline.
10. There was a row between the oarsmen about how to row properly.
11. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
12. She shed a tear upon seeing the tear in the painting.
13. The soldier had to desert his platoon in the desert.
14. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
15. The buck does get rather excited when the does are around.
16. The dump was so full it had to refuse more refuse.
17. To help plant the seeds the farmer taught his sow to sow.
18. The contract was subject to the term that I didn’t contract an illness within the first two months.
19. It took me a minute to locate the minute hole in the fence.
20. After months of procrastination, Helen decided to resume writing her resume.
21. I shall stop here because I am content with this content!

What do we call this? A cleat? A shoe with cleats on?

This list is rife with bewilderment and confusion, as a British mind attempts to make sense of terms, names and phrases that simply do not happen on the European side of the Atlantic.

Bachelorette
If you’re about to get married, and you want to throw a party to commemorate the passing of your single-ness, that’s got different names depending on where you are. The British prefer to call their male would-be-weds stags and their female counterparts hens. So instead of a bachelor or bachelorette party, there’s a stag do and a hen do. And it’s unlikely that, as with other traditions like baby showers, the American version will eventually take over as, to most British ears bachelorette sounds like an unnecessarily frilly feminization of an exclusively male term, akin to, I dunno, beardette or prostatrix.

Backhoe
Sometimes other people’s language decisions can be baffling. Imagine you’d never heard the term backhoe before, would you assume it meant the same as digger? Neither did I. Digger seems a lot clearer a word for a vehicle with a big digging device on its back—even one used for hoeing—than backhoe. Put a digger (most commonly known by its trade name JCB) in front of a Brit and ask them to think of alternative names for this invaluable building tool, and they simply would not come close to backhoe. Why would they? It’s a digger. It is used for digging. It digs. Backhoe? Tsk!

Bear claw (and elephant ear)
It’s odd, given that there are so many British sweet snacks with strangely unappetizing names—flies graveyard, fat rascal—that the bear claw and elephant ear haven’t made their way across the Atlantic. It is certainly not a lack of interest in danish-style pastries with fruit filling or palmier-style pastry swirls. Suffice to say if you’re visiting the U.K. and ask your hosts where you could get your hands on a bear claw, be prepared to wind up at the zoo.

Cleats
This is a little fiddly. Basically, U.S. sporting terminology uses the term cleats to describe a pair of shoes or boot with studs or spikes coming out of the sole to avoid slipping on grass. However, the U.K. version, the word simply refers to the studs themselves. That is, if we use the word at all (studs seems to work just fine). The only slight exception is that cyclists, whose cleats are not studs, do use the word more often, but its by no means common. You’re far more likely to hear football or rugby boots referred to as football or rugby boots, golf shoes as golf shoes, and for cyclists to talk openly about the stuff on the soles of their footwear to a largely befuddled audience.

Beltway
The M25 is a mighty motorway, forming a circle around London and keeping it safe from invaders (by creating a mighty perimeter shield of traffic). It is a road, and it is roughly in the shape of a ring, so it, and other roads that do a similar job, are known as ring roads. By contrast, a beltway sounds more like the bit where your groceries go at the supermarket, or possibly a branch of Weight Watchers that focuses more on girth than poundage.

Broil
The Brits have an international reputation for cooking food in hot liquids, so you could forgive them a moment’s confusion over the words boil and broil, especially when they’re really not the same thing. If you want to make toast, you have no toaster but you do have a cooker with an overhead heat source, for a Brit, that’s grilling, not broiling, as it takes place under a grill. Although grilling isn’t a million miles away from griddling, so neither approach makes life easy for hard-working chefs in a noisy kitchen environment. Let’s call this a draw.

Burglarize
Not that it would be hard to work out what someone meant if they used the term in the U.K., but if you were to come home to your home and find someone had broken in and stolen your stuff, while we can all agree that the crime is burglary, the verb form of that term is very different. While Americans say burglarize, Brits say burgle because it’s a crime committed by burglars, not burglarizers.

Druthers
A fine old American expression, derived from “would rather” (as in “if I had my would-rathers, I’d been living in Paris now”), but one that is entirely unknown in the U.K. outside of the context of American literature. It’s not that there’s been a decision not to use the term, delightful and colorful as it is, it’s just not used, and would probably cause a curling-up and blushing of any British person brave enough to give it a go.

Normalcy
It’s not as if there isn’t a term for things reaching their least unexpected state in the U.K—normality—it’s just the suffix is different. Normalcy just seems like a deliberately strange alternate choice, one which raises the interesting possibility of other options that may have once been on the table during a long and protracted brainstorm, such as normalitude, normalment, normalness or (for normal women) normalatrix.

Stick shift
“Do you drive a stick?” is a question that always raises a quizzical British eyebrow whenever it crops up in American TV shows or books, not least because the person asking it is always pointing to a car and never at anything that ever fell off a tree. And for once, this is a difference of culture as well as simple language. The British driver’s default position is to drive a car with a manually operated gearbox and three pedals. Automatic gearboxes were traditionally viewed with suspicion and only relatively recently enjoyed any kind of prominence as a driver option in Britain. Consequently, not only is it nonsensical to enquire as to the option of driving what Brits call a manualbecause almost everyone does, they wouldn’t understand stick shift as a term either, especially as automatics also have a stick that requires shifting.

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Puntolingue Teachers’Club

Are you an English teacher? Are you interested in sharing ideas about teaching methods? Do you want to have fun? This is the right place for you to be!

We are looking for highly motivated teachers who are afraid of not giving enough to students. We will have a couple of meetings in a month to discuss about issues that arise in classroom. There will be chosen topics for each meeting that will be announced in advance for you to prepare. Come and join us!!!

Associazione Culturale William Shakespeare

In Italian: Non avere peli sulla lingua. What it means: To speak plainly; not mince words.

12. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) Charlie Brown films make certainly no exception. It’s a hilariously good time, but ends with just the right amount of warmth and fuzziness to remind you and your family what Christmas is really about. You’ll want to watch this one every year.